Q: Why did you decide to write about Florence Nightingale,
and what are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about her?

A: I can sum up why I wrote this book in three words: what a
story! A privileged daughter in Victorian England feels compelled to go against
the expectations of her parents and society to pursue a life in nursing.

Then, within a few years of embarking on her hard-won
working life, she is placed in charge of nursing in British military hospitals
throughout the Crimean War zone. Once there, she turns around a wretched
situation, saves hundreds of lives, and goes on to elevate the profession of
nursing.

Many, many books about Nightingale had been written for young
children, but I saw that very little was available for adolescents and teens.

This was a shame, because there is so much in Nightingale’s
story that will speak directly to them. What young person hasn’t felt
misunderstood by his or her family or society? Who, while growing up, has not
felt chosen for an uncommon destiny?

The image of Florence Nightingale that comes to mind for
most people today is the one that was popularized in her lifetime: the “Lady
with the Lamp,” the saintly, selfless woman tirelessly caring for convalescing
soldiers.

I would not call this image inaccurate, but it is
incomplete. Nightingale could be stubborn, unreasonable, and demanding. She had
complicated relationships with the people close to her, including her sister,
her friends, and a man she might have married.

Also, her Crimean War service occupied only a brief couple
of years. She continued working to improve health care for Britons and
establish training for nurses for many years afterward.

Q: What do her experiences say about the role of women in
Victorian England?

A: Nightingale’s achievements tell us that the place of
women in society was poised for change. We may look back on the Victorian
period as a time of stodgy stability, but in fact it was an era of
transformation.

In 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne,
Britain was an agricultural nation where people traveled overland by carriage,
horse, or foot. Society conformed to a rigid hierarchy, with the monarch at the
pinnacle, nobility below royalty, followed by the gentry, the emerging middle
class, and the lower classes. People knew where they fit in.

Considered physically and intellectually inferior to men, a
lady of the middle or upper classes lived for home and family and was educated
accordingly. She was to be virtuous, gentle, selfless, and in need of a man’s
protection. The only profession open to her was teaching, and she pursued it only
if difficult financial circumstances forced her into the world.

By the time Victoria died, in 1901, Britain was an
industrial leader. Railroads and factories had altered the landscape. Cities
burgeoned with poor people displaced from farms and cottage industries. Darwin
had forced a reconsideration of long-held beliefs. The wealth and power of the
middle class were challenging the social order. And women were assuming a more
public role and campaigning for the right to vote.

I don’t want to give Florence Nightingale more credit than
she deserves for the expanded opportunities women were enjoying at the start of
the 20th century, but she certainly was an inspiration to many.

Unable to endure a traditional woman’s life taken up by such
trivialities as hosting dinners, choosing furniture, and hiring servants, she
fought hard against her family’s resistance to pursue the path she felt called
to follow. Her struggle led her at times to the verge of suicide, but she never
gave up.

And what she went on to accomplish was remarkable. “The time
is come when women must do something more than the ‘domestic hearth,’” Nightingale
wrote in 1853. It was time to do away with the old order, and for a courageous,
pioneering woman like Florence Nightingale to show what was possible.

Q: How did you research this book, and was there anything
that particularly surprised you in the course of your research?

A: “Miles of sick and wounded men lined the corridors,” I
write in Florence Nightingale as I describe the conditions Nightingale found
upon arriving at the army’s Barrack Hospital, in Turkey.

When the book was still in manuscript form and I was
reviewing the editorial comments, I saw that the copyeditor had tagged this
sentence with a single-word query: “Miles?” A mile seems so vast when compared
to a corridor; the copyeditor was actually asking, isn’t this an exaggeration?

It wasn’t. The Barrack Hospital was three stories high and
measured roughly six hundred feet on each side. Its corridors were nearly that
long. Each held tightly packed rows of suffering men lying in filthy bedding.
So, yes, there were miles of them.

The extent of the suffering and mismanagement that the
British Army tolerated in its wartime hospitals surprised me more than anything
else I read about while researching this book.

My research always draws me to primary sources, to letters,
diaries, articles in the press, and such. In this case I sought out primary
material on the British army hospitals during the Crimean War. I looked at
everything from Nightingale’s own writings, to the accounts of nurses and
others working in the hospitals, to official reports.

Newspapers were essential to me. During the Crimean War,
journalists for the first time were able to file their stories by telegraph,
which meant that the British public was reading eyewitness accounts of battles
just days after they were fought.

Members of the press also alerted readers to the realities
of the Barrack Hospital: the lack of trained medical staff, shortages of basic
supplies, men with battlefield wounds and dysentery crowded together and
receiving no attention. Embarrassed into taking action, the government turned,
incredibly, to a woman from a wealthy family who had managed a small hospital
for gentlewomen.

Q: Of all the biographies you’ve written, are there some
that have especially stuck with you over the years?

A: When we have spent a lot of time with people and have
come to know them well, the things they said and did, their way of looking at
the world, and the life lessons we have learned from them all stay with us after
the relationship ends.

In a similar way, my biographical subjects remain with me
after my books are written. I have strived so hard to understand them, and they
have taught me about so much—about courage, persistence, happiness, sorrow, and
human foibles—that they linger in my consciousness like old friends.

Because I write so often about creative people and therefore
immerse myself in their work, I also come away with the broadened awareness
that great art always imparts.

I would have to say that the most enriching book for me to
write was E. E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life. My close study of Cummings’s poetry
was pure joy. He was a playful poet but a profound one, and he was exacting in
his use of language. I frequently call to mind his verses, and they make me
smile or touch my heart. They renew my appreciation of his talent and gratitude
for his life.

I grew quite fond of my subject while writing Noah Webster:
Man of Many Words. Webster was a strange old fellow, opinionated, socially
awkward, and apt to rub people the wrong way.

But he was also a loving husband and father, and he was a patient
teacher, instructing the children in his schoolrooms and the people of his new
nation with the same care. Of course, the dictionary he created was nothing
short of wondrous. I simply couldn’t help liking him once I got to know him.

Jane Austen was born 17 years after Webster, but of all my
biographical subjects she seemed the most remote. Her England emerged to me as
much more foreign culturally than Webster’s America.

In addition, we know surprisingly little about Austen, who
was just beginning to gain recognition as a writer when she died. We don’t know
what she looked like or what caused her death. Neither do we know what she did
for months at a time.

Yet she poured so much of herself into her novels and
surviving letters that I came to know her as a bright, witty, insightful woman
and the great writer that she was. I like to imagine how this inquisitive woman
would react to my world, which would be as alien to her as hers was to me.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Readers can look forward to my young adult biography of
Queen Victoria in fall 2017. Victoria was such a character that she made
writing this book fun. She was idiosyncratic and emotionally volatile, yet she
was ramrod strong.

And what a story she gave me to tell! Imagine ascending to
the British throne at the age of 18. Victoria had to learn her role as she went
along, which meant that she made mistakes. This is true in life for all of us,
really, but our mistakes don’t cause national scandals or get the government
into a tizzy.

Victoria was also a partner in one of the most famous love
stories of the 19th century. Her name and that of her husband, Prince Albert,
are forever linked in the public consciousness.

Speaking of love stories, none is crazier, more romantic,
and ultimately more tragic than that of of Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe
Shelley. A 16-year-old girl elopes with a married man, children are born in and
out of wedlock (one lives and most die), great works of literature are written,
and all this happens before Percy Shelley drowns at age 29.

Percy Shelley has found a place among the great poets of the
Romantic Movement, and we remember Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as the teenage
author of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley is the focus of the book I am writing now.
Teens and adults will be enthralled by her story, just as I am. The book will
be out in 2018, and I can’t wait for you to read it!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I sometimes see my books described as useful references
that are well researched, filled with information, and helpful for students
writing reports.

I want them to be all these things, but I have written them
with the same attention to style, narrative structure, and character
development that can be found in quality fiction. I approach nonfiction as
literature and consider nonfiction for children and young adults to be an art
form.

So when you open Florence Nightingale, Victoria, or any of
my other works, I hope you will say to yourself, “This is going to be a good
book!”

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).